


Toe the Line

by Wisteria_Leigh



Series: Prompted Works [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Little bit of angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 02:04:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16525184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wisteria_Leigh/pseuds/Wisteria_Leigh
Summary: Ronan’s sort of annoying is infuriating, makes Adam blood boil, fills him with a sort of fire that can only go outward, that demands he confront it head on, in an almost cathartic kind of way. And it’s familiar. Sort of warm, in a weird way. Almost comforting in how he can expect it, how Ronan always seems to know the exact right buttons to press to set him off even if he doesn’t mean to.





	Toe the Line

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by [freezerjerky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freezerjerky/pseuds/freezerjerky) on Tumblr from [this list](http://purrincesscatitude.tumblr.com/post/179261036240/prompts-list): "you say you’ll stop, but then you keep doing it!”

Adam comes to the Barns after school, because he doesn’t have work for once in his life but does have a ton of calculus homework and a whole act of Hamlet to read & summarize scene-by-scene and college app deadlines looming like a swollen thunderhead. The Barns isn’t normally his most productive workspace, but it is warm and has more space for him to stretch out all his papers and textbooks, which feels like a thing he needs to do with the way everything is tangled in his head right now.

He’s been in a mood all day, can feel it festering just beneath his skin. He’s evolved over the months, now able to identify and acknowledge his bad days before they surprise him and his victim by shooting barbs from his tongue and condemnations he can’t take back. But knowing that he’s in a shit mood isn’t the same as controlling it. Growth is, as always, a slow and arduous process.

This evening, he sits at the dining room table under the kitchen’s yellow fluorescents. It’s only 6, but it’s already dark outside. Autumn winds rush over the mountains and rip through the valley, a harsh reminder that winter is only a month away.

Adam has a headache. Not a bad one, but enough that it bugs him, makes it that much harder to focus on equations and soliloquies and why he’s worthy of an Ivy-League education. Spreading the papers out hasn’t helped organized his brain like he wanted it to. Instead it just makes him more stressed, seeing all the work he has to do, all the expectations, all the time and money and thinking he needed in order to get through it all.

And then Ronan comes in.

Ronan understands why Adam does work here, encourages it, even. But that doesn’t mean Ronan finds it fair that Adam comes into his home only to completely ignore him. Some days he’s fine with it. Other days he goes and sulks elsewhere until Adam comes to him.

Today, however, Ronan wants Adam to be here and present. Wants to talk to him. Wants to sit with him, be with him, wants Adam’s undivided attention.

Currently, Adam’s cheating on him with a calculus textbook. And really? Calculus? He’d rather Adam shove his tongue down Skov’s throat.

He sits down at the table with him. Adam ignores him. Not unusual; they do this all the time. Homework-Mode Adam is a one-track mind, set to finishing whatever worksheet or essay or chapter he was working through and loath to be pushed off-course.  

Sometimes, though, Ronan likes to toe the line. Because Adam’s line, in his opinion, needs to be more fucking flexible.

Ronan starts small. Just to see where Adam’s line is today. He picks up a page of notes. Adam, scribbling through an equation, doesn’t react. Ronan scoff, drops it back on the table. Still nothing. He picks up more papers, reads them through with feigned interest and then lets them flutter back down to the table.

Adam is intentionally ignoring him now. Ronan can tell the difference.

He starts trying to build a card tower out of looseleaf papers. It’s going about as well as expected, and making plenty of noise. Opal, ever drawn to the sound of rustling, edible paper, clambers into the kitchen.

“Don’t, brat,” Ronan warns. Opal hisses at him. He rips a blank page from a notebook, crumples it into a ball, and throws it back out the door. Opal chases after it with a screech.

Adam winces. “Cut it out, Lynch.”

But he still hasn’t taken his eyes off his book, and Ronan still feels like a third wheel in his own home.

He starts drumming. Not any particular song, just a series of beats using a discarded pencil and his index finger. Adam tightens his grip on his pencil, glares at the problem sets.

“Lynch,” he grumbles. It’s a warning.

“Parrish,” Ronan replies. It’s a challenge.

Adam grinds his teeth, presses his pencil hard enough into the paper to leave imprints on the pages below it.

Ronan adds his foot to the rhythm.  

“Stop,” Adam demands, finally rips his eyes away from the page to shoot him a signature Adam Parrish witheringly frigid glare.

Ronan raises his hands in mock surrender. Adam returns to his work.

Ronan drums harder.

“Ronan.”

“Sorry, sorry. Just feeling the beat, you know?”

“There are ten other rooms in this house where you could go right now.”

“It’s my fucking house, so I’m going to stay in whatever fucking room I want.”

Adam rolls his eyes. Ronan is pretty sure he’s walking the line like a tightrope right now, and it’s dangerously close to snapping.

He lets Adam go back to work. Manages his energy quietly. Tries to not get jealous of a goddamn textbook.

He resolve lasts maybe five minutes.

He starts drumming again. On his leg. And then his leg starts jittering, and then his foot starts tapping.

And then he hits a beat too hard, slams his knee into the table, which makes Adam’s hand jolt, and the pencil catches in the paper and rips a hole in his problem sets.

“Ronan what the fuck,” he shouts, throwing his pencil on the table.

“Whoops,” Ronan says.

Adam rips the page from his notebook.

“Dude, chill. Just tape it, they won’t give a fuck.”

“That’s not the point. You’re being an asshole.”

“I’m not the one eye-fucking a damn textbook in someone else’s house.”

“Are you shitting me right now?”

“Just keep doing your damn homework, whatever,” Ronan says.

“Are you going to stop being an asshole?” Adam spits back.

“Does keeping you company mean I’m asshole? Then yes, I’ll gladly fuck the fuck off and let you keep nerding alone.”

“Bullshit, you’re not keeping me company. You’re being selfish and immature and it’s fucking obnoxious.”

“Fine. I’ll fucking stop. Jesus,” Ronan growls.  

“You say you’ll stop but then you keep doing it! Making noise and hitting the table and, just, being a fucking brat.”

“What do you want me to say, Parrish?” Ronan snarls, throwing himself out of his chair and storming towards the door.

“Nothing! You don’t need to say a goddamn thing!” Adam snaps. “Just stop.”

They stand apart: Ronan curling and uncurling his fists by the door, Adam digging his nails into the peeling cover of his calculus textbook. A war of wills.

Adam breaks the glare first. It isn’t a surrender. He shoves his schoolwork into his bag.

“I’m going home,” he announces.

Ronan scoffs. “Do whatever the fuck you want.”

Adam clenches his jaw. He leaves.

He bikes back to St. Agnes in the dark, pedaling hard as the frigid November air cuts his cheeks and turns his fingers white as bone. Running his trembling hands under hot water doesn’t do much, only heightens the pins & needles pricking under his skin. He flexes his fingers over and over as he settles at his desk. He starts rewriting his calc problems. It takes him an hour to finish, when it should have been thirty minutes. Valuable time sucked down the drain. He resists the urge to throw something. 

The wind rattles the window, howls through the gaps in its ill-fitted frame. Someone is practicing the organ. They’re not very good. The low notes send vibrations through the floor. It’s almost as annoying as Ronan. Almost.

But it’s a different kind of annoying. It’s cold, and distant. Turns him inward, makes him glare and grumble and bite his nails. The sort that can’t be remedied, that can only gnaw and curdle until he accepts the inevitability of constant suffering.

Ronan’s sort of annoying is infuriating, makes his blood boil, fills him with a sort of fire that can only go outward, that demands he confront it head on, in an almost cathartic kind of way. It makes them bicker and argue and shout at each other.

But it’s familiar. And sort of warm, in a weird way. In that it’s almost comforting in how he can expect it, how Ronan always seems to know the exact right buttons to press to set him off even if he doesn’t mean to.

A Ronan Lynch who isn’t annoying as hell isn’t the Ronan Lynch Adam learned to tolerate, and then like, and then like like; isn’t the Ronan Lynch Adam will probably decide he loves; isn’t the Ronan Lynch who can piss Adam off one second and have him laughing with side stitches the next; isn’t the Ronan Lynch who’s impulsiveness and brashness and pigheadedness can be as frustrating as it is liberating and joyful and wild and adventurous.

It isn’t the Ronan Lynch that Adam wants.

The apartment vibrates with a horrifically discordant note. Adam digs his nails into his scalp. Scrubs his hair into a ferocious mess.

The old walls creak. The organ resumes, quieter and in a higher register.

It’s been a long time since he was at St. Agnes alone. Truly alone. He’d sequestered himself here before, told Ronan he needed time to study, needed to finish a paper, needed to focus without distraction. But there was always a hope that Ronan would stop by for half an hour– perfectly timed when Adam was at his most exhausted or frustrated, a study break calculated, Adam guessed, by the months he had spent with him in the latest and earliest hours watching him study–with food in hand and a smirk on his face that Adam would spent 20 minutes kissing off and replacing with a very different sort of grin.

There isn’t that hope tonight, which…fucking sucks, if he’s being honest. Just one more load to weigh on his shoulders.

Adam’s stressed about school, about all the essays he needs to write and the tests he has coming up, and the fact that grades are due soon and he’s sure he’s doing fine but there’s always a chance that someone’s parents are going to buy their slacker son a 4.0 and kick Adam down to Salutatorian. He’s stressed about the SAT Subject Tests he needs in order to apply for the schools he wants, not just the studying and the psychological prep work necessary to outsmart the test in the way it wants you to, but the money it’ll cost him and the weekends he’ll lose taking them means he has to stack hours at Boyd’s and the warehouse and the factory now, and even then he doesn’t know if he’ll have enough money for food after he pays for the tests. He’s stressed about having to take all these shifts to pay for the tests and the college applications, because even though he got a waiver for a few of them (it was Gansey’s idea, one that made Adam absolutely furious. The way he coincidentally mentioned it at lunch the day following Adam venting to Ronan about their discriminating pricing and Ronan ranting about how “it’s the fucking system, man. Rigged bullshit, is all it is.” And don’t even get him started on the humiliating conversation with the Aglionby college counselor that followed) he still has to pay for the supplements for a few of them because Ivies are nothing if not completely ignorant to the concerns of people making below a yearly income of 200k.

Oh, and he’s not sleeping well. None of them are, he guesses, from the bags under their eyes when they gather around the table at Nino’s. It’s only been 35 days since…all that. And when Adam can find a few spare hours untouched by work and admission essays and calculus problems and Hamlet reading notes, he shuts his eyes and finds himself choking the life out of Ronan again, or seeing Aurora’s mangled corpse in a field of rotting trees, or watching Gansey fall lifeless into Blue’s arms again and again and again…

Shit.

This is his fault, isn’t it?

He wasn’t pissed at Ronan. He was pissed about everything else and Ronan just happened to be the target in front of him when he burst. And then he’d upped and stormed off like the biggest asshole in the world.

Adam was the problem right now. Adam was the shitty one.

If that didn’t make him feel so damn guilty, he’d relish this personal growth and newfound introspection.

Instead, he's lonely and annoyed. And regretful. And cold. And these calc problems are damn near impossible. And that stupid amateur organist is so bad did they really think this hobby was worth continuing? And…

Oh, fuck it.

Adam grabs his sweater and barely remembers to lock the door. He bikes, fast and hard, ignoring the bitter wind as it makes his eyes water and nose burn. He almost eats dirt on the side of the road when he rounds a corner too fast, but he keeps going.

The wind is still howling when he drops his bike in the gravel driveway of the Barns and bangs on the door. It take him a minute, but Ronan eventually answers.

“Parrish?” he says, pushing open the screen door.

“I’m stressed about my SAT scores,” Adam blurts out, shoulders hunched and hands squeezed in the armpits of his sweater against the whipping winds. “And about needing to take these stupid subject tests. And about picking up all these extra shifts just to pay for them, and I need to get all these college apps in soon, but I have no idea what to write about for any of these stupid essays without making myself sound pathetic or pitiful and melodramatic. And I can’t sleep anymore, after what happened with…everything. I feel like I’m running on empty all the time, which, by the way,  my car is since I’m spending all of my money to take these dumb tests and buy transcripts, and did you know that teachers who write you recommendations expect a gift? Like what bullshit is that? So now I have to get these, too. And it’s just so much, Ronan. All the fucking time. And, shit, your mother fucking died in front of you. Like, my shit is so…stupid compared to what you’re dealing with and yet I’m the one being an asshole and taking my shit out on you and I’m just…” Adam breathes. And freezes.

Ronan had led him inside. Sat him on the couch. Draped a blanket around his shoulders. And Adam hadn’t realized.

Ronan sits on the coffee table, chewing his leather bands and avoiding Adam’s gaze. Their legs fit together like puzzle pieces.

“Ditto,” Ronan says around the leather. “‘Cept not the school shit. Obviously.”

He drops his wrist, leans his elbows on his knees and runs his fingers in circles along the faded denim stretched across Adam’s knee. “I just. Today was rough. I wanted…I needed someone else. Something to focus on, other than…”

He can’t finish. Adam doesn’t need him to.

Adam sighs with relief. “I’m sorry,” he says. It feels weird to say. Weird but good. Another step forward.

“Me too,” Ronan echoes.

They sit close, legs fitting together like puzzle pieces.

“Okay, seriously though,” Ronan says suddenly. “Don’t bike at night again. You never know what sort of assholes are going to take those corners too sharp and flatten your ass into a pancake.”

“If the asshole in question is waiting for me at his house, then it shouldn’t be an issue,” Adam replies with a smirk.

Ronan rolls his eyes. “Just fucking call next time, loser.”

“Good to know you’ll still chauffeur even if we’re fighting.”

Ronan snorts. “That was barely a fight. You want to fight, I’ll show you a fucking fight.”

“Oh yeah?”

Ronan tackles him into the couch. Adam cries out with laughter.

This wasn’t their last fight. There would be more disagreements, more spats, more storming off and misunderstandings and cursing and regretted words. But they’d be okay. They would always be okay.


End file.
